6  An intense search for a registered sex offender accused of sexually assaulting two women and kidnapping one of them in Vista Monday night ended with his arrest Tuesday afternoon in an Oceanside motel, authorities said.

Jeremy Ryan Stutzman, a 33-year-old parolee, was arrested without incident at the Motel 6 on North Coast Highway at 3:25 p.m., said sheriff’s spokeswoman Melissa Aquino.

The manhunt for Stutzman began about 11:15 p.m. Monday after sheriff’s deputies were called to the Mill Creek Apartments on South Santa Fe Avenue south of Buena Creek Road, where a 20-year-old woman said she was tied up and attacked, sheriff’s Lt. Jim Duffy said.

She told deputies that her 19-year-old friend had also been sexually assaulted and that the attacker took her away at knifepoint. He dropped her off about 9 a.m. the next day a block away from the apartment, homicide Lt. Larry Nesbit said.

The assailant was driving the 20-year-old’s gray Toyota Corolla, which was later recovered.

The women and Stutzman all live at the apartment complex. Nesbit said it’s unclear if they knew each other.

In 2002, Stutzman was sentenced to 10 years in state prison for sexually assaulting and terrorizing an Escondido woman two years earlier.

The 25-year-old victim testified that he entered her Escondido apartment at gunpoint, tied her up and made her model various lingerie outfits, which he cut off her with a steak knife. He then lay on top of her naked and fondled her, but did not rape her.

He could have been sentenced to almost 20 years in prison, but Superior Court Judge Joan Weber gave him the lighter term because of his young age, because his previous brushes with the law were considered to be minor, and because he had expressed remorse in what she described as an “eloquent” letter.

Since Stutzman was paroled in August 2009, he had been returned to prison three times, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Stutzman was given a bad-conduct discharge from the Marines in 1999 after spending more than two years in a military jail for stealing a Navy vehicle and being absent without leave.